


lucid veins

by rukafais



Series: a study of divinity [1]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Self Harm, d...death? ish?, gods and vessels are weird dot txt, yeah lets warn for death just to be safe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 06:23:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18255548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: The Nightmare King slumbers, and dreams. His visions, his memories, are visceral and haunting.Occasionally, his vessel explores them in the eternity of sleep, attempting to understand the god that is and is not himself, the existence intertwined.





	lucid veins

**Author's Note:**

> Something more esoteric and surreal and horror-ish, since I haven't done that in a while and Hollow Knight is good territory for that kind of thing.

_"For what might be hours, you listen to the beating of your heart. A kind of phantasmagoria comes upon you. Your body is a stranger to you." - Black Crown Project_

Dreams are light and sky and open water; void is a dreamless sea, deep enough to rest, to drown, to keep what it takes. Where no light from the surface can ever reach.

Nightmares are soft velvet darkness and twisting corridors, claustrophobia and fear. Deep tunnels and winding passages, the patterns of veins and life sunk deep into the earth. Red as blood.

He breathes deep, even though he doesn’t need to. The air tastes of smoke and fire, acrid and dry. Here, it always does.

_The god breathes deep and tastes blood, or something like it._

_The texture on his back, his arms, is an unbearable reminder. It crawls on him, grey and clinging; wings he can no longer use. No more dreams of flying. No more wind-touched journeys through clouded skies. No more._

_His body is too heavy, too painful, too aching. A mass of pain that slows his thoughts to crawling, that leaves him sluggish and desperate. He trembles, crushed with agony under his own weight._

_He needs to be smaller - he has to be smaller, or he won’t survive - he splits open gaping wounds and spills blood that burns red-hot and finishes what his sister started. He rends himself to pieces in frantic metamorphosis, the desperate act of prey in a trap. Tearing off limbs in a furious effort to escape._

_Surrounded by the ruins of a larger shell, his heart remains, and what little of him left untouched inside._

_Exhausted by the act, shielded by his own shed corpse, he sleeps._

He wakes, still breathing deep, dream inside a dream. Hands running furtively over his own chest, his own body, to check for scars, though he knows innately that it will always heal. No wound will ever mark him eternally; flame will spill from the injuries to punish the aggressor; in time the scars will fade as if they were never there.

It is an apology for the burden, or maybe an attempt at sparing themselves-himself further agony, or simply how it is to be a kind of divinity. Maybe it is all of those things at once.

The tunnels wind endlessly, a maze of entrances and exits that feed into each other. Anyone else would be lost.

He is not. No matter how far he goes, he knows where is; he cannot be lost inside himself, though at times it certainly feels that way. In his attempts to understand, he feels like an intruder inside his own body, like these visions are not meant for him, like they are something too unbearable and ancient for him to witness.

If the Nightmare King had wished it, he could have locked these memories away forever. But he does not, will not, forget. The ache he slumbers to have respite from will never fade.

Unlike mortals, whose wounds heal, a god’s does not. That ancient pain is part of him now, for better or worse.

The tunnels descend into deep darkness, a silence without end. The heat is less here; a chill prickles over his shell. A phantom wind scrapes across his face, harsh and merciless. His heartbeat is distant and far away.

It’s so cold.

He breathes in and tastes ash.

_He coughs endlessly, unable to stop. Out of blood to spill, what issues from his rubbed-raw throat is only the remains of fire, of life. His heart drums frantically._

_The panicked sound, pervasive, insistent, loud, fills his entire world._

_It’s so cold. He’s never been cold before, not like this. Invisible claws scrape and crush against him in a maddening, frightening frenzy, unstoppable, unrelenting. It steals warmth from him, little by little._

_He runs his fingers through the dull embers, the fragments of his own power, gathered inside the Heart. He cannot be here, exposed, defenseless, dying. Nor can he stay inside that protective cocoon forever and stagnate; that too is death._

_He can no longer change._

_But something else, someone else..._

_He rakes together the coals of himself and makes a choice that will define the future._

_Burn the father, feed the child --_

_The spark ignites, the flames leap to life. Weak and frail though they are, they are new._

_His last breath is his vessel’s first._

He breathes out, and the taste of a fire’s death lingers. Hand against his chest, to ensure his heart still beats; deep breaths cycling through, to prove he can, to prove the memory ( _their_ memory _his_ memory) has not mastered him.

No matter how many times he sees these things and lives them, the physical sensations are what comes to him first and foremost. He feels old wounds as if they are his own; the pain lingers. But the emotions are lost.

He wonders if the god remembers ( _he wonders if he has forgotten_ ) the way he felt, or if those things are no longer necessary ( _if he has deliberately cast them away, too painful to relive_ ). Or, perhaps, even he is barred from experiencing it.

 _Are you so eager to feel that sadness in death?_ says the voice ( _he thinks_ ), sparking embers on the wind, warming the air.

He admits that he is not. Though the thought does not come again, the warmth remains; a welcome shield against the cold, a second cloak settled around his shoulders by invisible hands.

He climbs out of the cold and into warmth once more, into those tangled red corridors. He moves on.

His wanderings take him to a chamber he has been many times before; it resembles, organically, in its twists and turns and echoing sounds, what he imagines the interior of a heart to look like.

It is warm here (for any intruder, this heat would be sweltering, unbearable, a raging inferno). But this fire is no stranger to him; it welcomes him home, a traveler weary from a long journey, a lost child finally safe in their parent’s arms. It wraps him like a blanket, easing that deep and ancient weariness in him.

The lifeblood of the Heart is white-hot, blue and red intermingled, incandescent and beautiful. It, too, is a sea, hidden deep underground. The nightmares of hundreds of bugs, the ends of hundreds of kingdoms - all burned for kindling, consumed for peace of mind. He never tires of watching it, of breathing it in (it tastes like fire on his tongue, pure fire, too hot to give off smoke, too undying for ash).

Creatures of dream, not yet consumed and not yet born, swim in the flame as flame themselves. One moment there, the next not. They are beautiful, fleeting things; their shapes crumble and decay to horrors, as nightmares do, but he is the master, and he is not afraid - and he finds them beautiful still.

He listens to the heartbeat that matches his own and feels at peace.

The god whispers _Child, come to me,_ and he does.

( _Or maybe it is the flames that turn to hands and pull him down into the fire, and he does not resist. Or there is no such thing, and it is his own thoughts that guide him into the current._ )

Little by little, the fire consumes him. It takes fingers, hands, legs and limbs, organs and chitin; replaces sensation with pain and then quickly numbness. He watches himself crumble in the flame with a strange, soft detachment, like this body is not his, like it never was.

The fire eats him alive. He doesn’t mind.

_The fire holds the recollection of every incarnation that was burned to create it, every feeling, every individuality. Their physical forms are gone, the vessel burned - but still, here in memory, they remain._

_Music, sound, light and flame and laughter; failure, sorrow, tragedy and triumph, bittersweet victory. The bright and simple happiness of childhood, the first sting of sadness and the ashen taste of failure, the joy and sorrow of countless lives. He sees shards of what he’s seen and done reflected in theirs, but some things are all his own, and that too is a treasure to be preserved when the time comes._

_They sleep in the Heart, becoming a part of it; there they stay until the world ends._

_Old pain....old scars...does not fade, murmurs the god, and the voice comes from everywhere and inside his head, too._

_The striking, crimson reflection of him (not quite the same; longer horns and a more tattered, feathery cape, reminiscent of the wings he-they once had) shimmers like an illusion in his sight._

_But this...too...does not._

_The Nightmare King’s normally impassive, eerie expression changes. A slight crinkle of the eyes, a slight lift of the chin; a small and subtle smile._

_It is...enough._

_The god rends him to pieces to wake him, but nightmares are as good dreams to the god-as-vessel, vessel-as-god, so neither of them mind. Ribbons of himself fall away into that endless fire, and he thinks little of it._

_Destruction, rebirth. Endless songs and endless change._

He stirs, silent in contemplation. Familiar music is playing, somewhere. He hangs there and listens, letting it wash over him.

The god is quiet, pain briefly forgotten.

Grimm stretches and yawns, languidly, and feels refreshed.

Once again, he is himself, and his body is his own, and he is satisfied.


End file.
